Homemade Pasta

What have you been cooking and eating lately? It's been a while since I shared with you what I've been making so I thought it might be fun to share my latest adventure...

First of all, I took a pasta making class a couple weeks ago at a place in Waco called Gourmet Gallery. It's a cute little kitchen store and they also hold lots of classes where they teach you how to make things such as pasta, tamales, bread, Mediterranean food, Easter desserts...I mean it's quite the range of classes. It's amazing. The only negative thing is that it costs money to take these classes. (Shocking, I know!) And often more money than I have.

However, this class only cost $35 so Camden and I decided to take it together! We learned how to make homemade spaghetti with marinara sauce and butternut squash ravioli with brown butter sage sauce. Amazing. So we decided to try it at home.

Here I am rolling out the dough:

Here are our noodles waiting to be cooked:

And here they are after they were cooked!

Those noodles are definitely much thicker than any of the ones we made at our class, but we were working without the help of a pasta roller. They still tasted great.

Here's the recipe we used for the dough. This recipe is from our class we took and courtesy of chef Juanita Barrientos, who taught the class:

2 cups flour (we did half whole wheat and half all-purpose)

1 t. kosher salt

4 large eggs

1 T extra virgin olive oil

Cornmeal, for dusting

On a flat, clean surface make a mound of flour. Add salt and make a well in the center. Crack all the eggs inside the well, add olive oil, and scramble them with a fork until combined, gathering some flour from the walls in the process. When dough is dry enough to handle, begin to knead dough until elastic in texture. This process should take at least ten minutes - even longer with whole wheat dough! You will notice a huge change in the way the dough feels after it has been kneaded long enough. It will be so soft compared to when you started.

Next, divide the dough in half, rub each half with olive oil, wrap them with plastic, and let them rest before it's rolled out. Or don't, whatever. Then roll out the dough by hand until it's 1/8 an inch thick, if you do it the way we did. Or do it the way the chef recommended, and the way we did it in class, and use this amazing pasta roller Kitchen Aid attachment that I really really really want...(Hint hint, to those of you who sometimes buy me really expensive presents...) But anyway.

It's so good! It tasted delicious! And you can buy spaghetti sauce if you want, or you can make it! Camden and I made our own vodka cream sauce from a cookbook I have to go with it, and it was delicious. If you go to the cookbook on Amazon and click "search inside this book" and then search for vodka cream sauce, you can get that recipe too. Of course, I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but oh well.

So that's my latest cooking accomplishment! We haven't been brave enough to try the ravioli yet, but I will eventually. And hopefully I'll even branch out further. Seriously, this stuff was good. And extremely cheap to make. That's a winner in our house every time!

Have you had any cooking adventures lately?

Here I am!

I'm alive!

Where have I been for the last month, you ask?

Well, first of all, I have been sick with some sort of nasty combination of an upper respiratory infection and a sinus infection...it literally put me out of commission for about 2 weeks. I went to the doctor twice - the first time he told me to take over the counter cold medicine and drink hot tea. The second time, about a week and a half later, when I went again because I was getting worse and worse, he finally gave me antibiotics. I started feeling better within a day or two but then felt nauseous for the next few days due to the antibiotics. Now I'm finally feeling better and no longer feel like I'm going to faint while trying to work, which is always nice.

In other news, Dan is in Austin this week playing soccer with other guys from his MBA program. There's some big soccer tournament for MBA students. They play soccer during the day and then have a party/network with each other at night. So, that's cool. Sammie is freaking out without him here and won't settle down. I'm not sure what's going to happen with her when he leaves for longer periods of time...it will be interesting. And by interesting, I mean extremely annoying.

What else have we been doing? Well, school, school and more school. This is the hardest semester for both of us, so we are just bogged down with work. It kind of stinks, honestly. But! Spring break is only two weeks away and that's the halfway point of the semester! So hopefully we can make it. Seriously though, this semester is ridiculous.

However, in more positive news, I've started working on my DISSERTATION!! Yeah!! Actually, it's just my proposal, which is when you...well...propose your dissertation. But it's basically the introduction and methods section of my dissertation, so by working on my proposal, I'm effectively working on my dissertation. Which makes me so excited.

Most importantly, it's the final season of LOST. If you haven't started watching it yet, start now. Or don't, but just know that I may not have anything to talk about with you ever again. This show is full of so much symbolism...every phrase uttered on it is so rich with layers of meaning. If I was a couple years farther behind in my schooling, I would write my dissertation on this show. Actually, maybe I still will. Or a book. Because, it's just that good.

So I may or may not update more often now. But I'm just saying hi. I hope you all are doing well.

This Semester's Classes

Okay, now that classes have started, I can give you a quick rundown on what they are. My first class of the day is Psychopharmacology, which is basically a class where you learn about every little receptor on every little neuron in your brain and their infinite variations, and then about every drug that affects them which is usually referred to by a title such as RK10293 or something like that, and then you apparently have to memorize all this information for the test.

Yeah. That's that class. Luckily, it's actually entertaining and interesting during class...but when I'm tested on this, there's a high chance I'm going to fail.

My other class is Measurement, which is another statistics class (third in grad school, 6th in my college career if you're keeping track). We get to do a real research project, so hopefully that will be interesting and I can somewhat relate it to my upcoming dissertation research.

Dan is taking Accounting, Econ, Operations, Statistics, Finance, IT, Healthcare finance, Healthcare Econ, Strategy, and Public Health. That's all!

The first six classes are his "core" classes, which means he takes them every semester but they are only one credit hour. He thinks the rest of them are going to be pretty interesting - his professors really know their stuff. Although he will have a ton of work, but I guess that's what you get with 17 credit hours.

Sammie is taking Sleeping, Eating, Going Outside, Playing with Toys, and Learning to Ride in the Car. They are her "core" classes too, and she has done pretty well in all of them in previous semesters - except Learning to Ride in the Car. We're hoping this will be her year for mastering that. No Obedience Class yet for her...we don't want to risk her self-esteem by putting her in a class she might not be the best at.

I Cooked a Chicken!

You guys! I did it! I cooked a chicken! Not just a chicken breast or thighs...but a whole darn chicken! It was so freaking cool.

The best part was, it was really easy. I followed the directions from this blog to do it in the crockpot. And I didn't even know where to buy a whole chicken at the grocery store, but it was right with the divided up chicken that I normally buy...so that was easy. And it was way cheaper to buy it this way so I bought organic chicken, so that was nice too. The whole prepping part took me about oh...five minutes. I just put it in the crockpot and it was all ready at dinner time! I thought I would have to carve it like a turkey or something, but I didn't - the meat just came right off the bone using tongs. We just ate it with some roasted veggies and it was delicious, although next time I might try some sort of sauce. And there was a TON left over, so we froze some of it to use in the future and I'm going to make soup from some of it too.

So the point is, you should do it!

I just read "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. It's a novel and so good. I wanted to mention it because if you have the chance to read it, you should.

Dan just read "Jesus Wants to Save Christians" by Rob Bell. I think he has a few questions about Rob Bell's theology, but regardless, he really liked the book and felt it was very challenging.

If you have some time to do some reading but don't know what to get, check out one of these!

Lazy Sunday

Blogger is acting really funny. I uploaded a whole bunch of pictures and it won't let me move them around at all. I've been playing with it for a while, and I'm sure there's probably some way to get it to work right, but instead you're just going to get to see the pictures in random order! Think of it as Memento for blogs...minus the whole plot thing...

Here's Dan on Friday night. We went to Diamondback's, a fancy steakhouse in Waco, to celebrate our 2 year anniversary! It was a little late since Dan had been sick, but it was worth the wait. We had a great evening out and had amazing food. I'm actually sort of glad we didn't end up doing anything when we were in Columbus, because otherwise I don't think we would have been eating at Diamondback's anytime soon!

Okay, this is Camden and I last night. Camden had the great idea to start a new tradition in 2010 where we cooked dinner together the first weekend of every month. We're going to try to learn new techniques or try new types of dishes. Last night, Dan and Sammie and I went over to their house and Camden and I cooked an entire Indian meal! We made chicken, a vegetable curry, turmeric rice, and then the boys picked out wine to go with it. The evening was a complete success.

I really don't understand how these are this out of order, and why I can't fix it! Grr!! Anyway, this is from Christmas break when I was sick...

Here's Dan with his steak filet at Diamondback's:

Here's me...I got salmon but this picture is before the food came.

Here are Julie and I on Christmas Eve:

And Dan and I the same night:

And the best for last! Dan and Sammie snuggling. Isn't she just the most adorable dog you have ever seen. All together now: Awwwwwww...

Today is the last Sunday before classes start...Dan has class tomorrow straight from 9:30am to 5:00pm with no breaks! Luckily, Mondays are his only day like that. He'll have 2 or 3 classes on Tuesday - Thursday, and none on Friday. I still work MWF and I'll have class from 8:00-11:00am on Tuesday and Thursday. I'll tell you more about our classes once we actually have them.

One last picture - I know you are jealous of my family! :)

Happy New Year

It's 2010! Christmas break is over and it's time to get back to the grind. I can't believe it went so fast...actually, I can't believe 2009 went so fast.

2009 was the year that I got my master's degree. It was the year that Dan ended his teaching career and started his MBA program. We celebrated our 2 year anniversary by watching movies and then going to bed early because Dan was sick. We traveled to Fredericksburg, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas (TX), Beaver Creek (CO), and I also went to New York City. I ran my second marathon. I learned that I am allergic to shellfish and therefore it was the last year that I will have ever (knowingly) eaten shrimp, scallops, or any of their cousins. We got to know people from our church better and were part of a great small group. We also made lots of new friends through Dan's MBA program.

Our favorite shows were Lost, Glee, Top Chef, and 30 Rock. The best movies we saw were The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Away We Go, Slumdog Millionaire, and Marley and Me, . My favorite books I read were "Awareness" by Anthony DeMello, "Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller, and "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger.

2009 was the year that Dan and I really settled into being married. A lot of the previous year was spent learning how to live together. We had trouble settling on how clean our apartment needed to be, what we ate for dinner every night, and those kinds of things. We had pretty much worked those things out and therefore 2009 was spent still working on our marriage but more fine-tuning. I no longer leave my towels laying on the floor (too often) and Dan no longer complains (much) when we have a meatless meal. Oh, and he takes the dog out every morning. :)

So here we are again at the beginning of a new year. I wonder what this year will bring?